The Darkest Night

by Rick Reed

  Liddell slowed and made a right on a dirt road. No sugarcane was planted here, and Jack could see a bend in the Mississippi ahead of them. Liddell pulled onto the side of the road beside a well-worn path, and they got out.

  “And this is where me and Landry used to fish.” He spread his arms wide.

  Jack was impressed. It was at least five hundred yards to the opposite bank, and he could see fishermen in singles and groups, set up along the opposite bank with lines in the water and beers in their hands.

  “After we find Evie and catch the bad guys, and if the girls will let us, we need to come down here and fish for a few days,” Jack said.

  “Yep,” Liddell said.

  Two shirtless preteens came walking down the path behind them, heading toward the river. Their blue jeans were rolled up to their knees. One wore an Atlanta Braves baseball cap that had seen better days, the other had on a Saints cap bearing an embroidered fleur-de-lis with the word SAINTS embroidered in gold beneath the emblem in case you were stupid. The boys were carrying fishing poles made of bamboo, and one carried a Styrofoam bait bucket.

  “Fishing good along here?” Liddell asked.

  “We ain’t got to fishin’ yet,” the boy with the Saints cap said. His tone said, “Don’t you know nothing?”

  “My buddy was fishing here before you were even a gleam in your papa’s eye,” Jack said. “So show some respect.”

  “Sorry, Mister,” the boy in the Braves cap said. “He’s been grouchy ever since the Seahawks lost to the Patriots last year.”

  “Have not,” Saints cap said.

  “See what I mean?” Braves cap said with a shrug.

  A rabbit ran across the path in front of Jack, faked left, turned right, and disappeared into the high grass.

  “Hey, Mister. Turn your left pocket inside out,” the boy with the Braves cap said in a whisper.

  “Excuse me?” Jack asked, seeing the kid was talking to him.

  Saints cap said, “If a rabbit runs across your path you have to walk backwards a couple steps and turn your left pocket inside out.”

  Braves cap argued, “You don’t have to walk backward.”

  “Do too,” Saints cap said earnestly. “An’ if you hear a screech owl at night it’s a sure sign of death.”

  The Braves cap was moving up and down enthusiastically. “We heard one last night. I hope something don’t get you,” he said and pushed Saints cap.

  Liddell grinned and said, “If a dog howls and lays flat on his back, that’s a sign of death too.”

  “If your ear is burning, someone’s talking bad about you,” Jack offered.

  Braves cap said, “It has to be the left ear though, Mister. If it’s the right ear, they’re saying something good about you.”

  The kid with the Saints cap said, “C’mon, Jitters. We got fishing to do.”

  “Hold your horses.” Braves cap, now known as Jitters, reached in his jeans pocket and handed something to Jack.

  Jack examined the object the boy had handed him. It was a dirty, balding in spots, rabbit foot. He watched the kid’s face, trying to judge if the kid was having him on. He wasn’t.

  Jitters said, “I found that in the cemetery over there. It’s a left hind foot of a rabbit. That’s one powerful talisman. It keeps evil away.”

  Jack tried to hand the mangy gift back, but Jitters stepped back and said, “You keep it, Mister. It’s good luck too. You look like you need it mor’n me.”

  The two boys went off down the path toward the bank, and Jack held the rabbit’s foot out between finger and thumb. “What does it mean when someone give you a rotting animal limb?”

  Liddell laughed. “It means he likes you.”

  After another mile the road tied back into Highway 1. Jack hated to admit it, but Whiteside may have been right to put her officers to better use than watching that road. There didn’t seem to be enough traffic to merit even a speed trap, and he could see how the people who worked or lived back in here would feel singled out.

  “I guess we can just go to the mansion,” Jack said.

  “What’s our reason for being there?”

  “We’re with a movie company and scouting locations,” Jack said. He took a pair of sunglasses from the visor and slipped them on. “From detective to movie producer with a simple pair of sunglasses.”

  Liddell said, “I’ll be the movie producer. You look more like Jack Murphy trying to look like Tom Cruise.”

  “Bradley Cooper,” Jack said. “And I pull it off.”

  They made a U-turn and drove back down the road. Jack said, “There’s nowhere even to pull off. How the hell did the PPD guys run radar? There’s not even a billboard to set behind.”

  “I’ll show you.” Liddell turned onto a wide gravel lane. The cane fields opened and the gravel road spread around a squat churchlike structure with an arched door and colored leaded-glass windows. The building had been added on to several times over its history. The most recent addition was made of unpainted plywood with no windows and no outside entry visible. The roof was simple tarpaper that hung over the sides like bangs on a flat head.

  “Why would Barbie come back here to see this?” Jack said.

  “Not this,” Liddell said and drove past the church to an intersecting gravel road. He turned a sudden forty-five degrees to the left and punched the gas.

  Almost half a mile in the distance Jack could make out the tiled roof of a structure at least three stories high. As he got closer the cane gave way to sweeping areas of manicured lawn dotted with live oaks and cottonwood trees. They were still a good distance from the mansion when they saw heavy chain-link gates blocking the road. There were red signs on the chain link warning against trespassing. They approached the gates. The signs read, NO TRESPASSING and NO ENTRY. Two men stepped in front of the gates, both cradling pump shotguns to prove it.

  “This wasn’t here when I was a kid,” Liddell said.

  “Yeah,” Jack said. The guards were wearing baggy shorts, tank tops, and yellow suede Caterpillar boots. One was light skinned, maybe of Cuban descent, the other wore dreadlocks and was dark skinned. Dreadlocks was maybe nineteen and had a Cubs baseball cap angled on his head. The light skinned one was older. Maybe thirties. He seemed to be the intelligent one. It turned out he was. Jack and Liddell got out and approached the gates, standing almost nose-to-nose with the guards. Dreadlocks’ eyes vibrated, but stayed on Liddell.

  The light-skinned one relaxed his posture and grip on the shotgun. “Wha’chu want?” he asked, but in a polite, nonthreatening tone.

  Jack noticed this one had a portable radio clipped to his waistband. Jack said, “We want to see Papa.”

  “He no wan’ see you,” Dreadlocks said, never taking his eyes off Liddell.

  “We won’t know that until you call him on your radio,” Jack said. “I think he’ll want to see us.”

  Dreadlocks grip tightened on the shotgun and Jack could see muscles rippling in his arms.

  The older one put a hand on Dreadlocks’ arm and pushed the shotgun barrel further toward the ground. He said, “I’m callin’ Papa.”

  The older one walked a few feet away, keeping them in sight, and talked to someone on the radio. Jack couldn’t hear the response and noticed an earpiece stuck in the guy’s ear. He came back and faced Jack. “He’s not here, and we’re told not to let anyone in.”

  Jack stood there another minute and watched Dreadlocks’ eyes before he and Liddell got back in their car.

  “That kid isn’t old enough to have a gun,” Liddell said.

  “Private property,” Jack said. “But you’re right. He’s looks high on something. You towered over both of them, but he wasn’t scared in the least. I think he wanted to start shooting.”

  Liddell backed up and turned around, careful not to get hung up in the cane field. “Makes you wonder, don’t it?” Jack said.

  “I’ve never seen armed guards out here before. Fences, yeah. But those two are not locals, if you ask me.
Meth lab?” Liddell suggested.

  “Did Bitty work drug cases?”

  Liddell said, “No. She steered clear of narcotics cases. She always said if they tried to put her in the Narcotics Unit she’d quit. We’d work homicides involving drugs, and it was part of our job on Water Patrol, but not anything undercover. She said working druggies was like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon.”

  “Let’s go see the Sheriff,” Jack said, and headed back to Highway 1. As they passed the church building, the front door opened and five youngsters emerged. They were all smiling, and looking over their shoulders at someone who must have been just inside the door. Their expressions were fixed on their faces and they weren’t talking to each other. Like they were in another world. Liddell had passed the church and hadn’t seen the kids.

  If they weren’t so young, Jack would have thought their expressions were drug induced. These kids were in the age bracket of ten to fourteen years old as close as he could tell.

  “Slow down a little. I want to see something,” Jack told Liddell. The car slowed. Jack twisted in his seat, looking back at the church doorway. He saw part of a woman’s face looking out at him, then disappearing back inside. He’d only caught a glimpse, but he could tell she was white, age somewhere between thirty and forty years old.

  She must have called to the kids, because they stopped, turned around, and went back inside, casting worried glances over their shoulders at Jack’s car.

  Chapter Thirty

  Jack used the phone given to Liddell by Sheriff Guidry and punched 1. The Sheriff answered on the first ring. He was still at Dusty’s and wanted them to come to him. They did.

  Firefighters were still directing hoses on stubborn hot spots where smoldering coals would reignite even the waterlogged material.

  “You want what?” Guidry asked when they pulled him aside. He was in a T-shirt and wearing jeans tucked into knee-high rubber boots covered in ashes. The house was destroyed. The stone chimney stood like a lonely statue, the fields behind it. Part of the side wall had collapsed onto the carport, but that turned out to be a blessing because it somewhat protected the motorcycle and dirt bikes from the flames. Dusty’s motorcycle was missing.

  “We want you to get a search warrant for the Laveau Plantation and the surrounding buildings and property,” Jack said.

  “Based on what?” Guidry asked.

  Jack told him about their conversation with Chief Anna Whiteside, the information Kurtis Dempsey had given them, and the possible connection with Officer Barbierre.

  “One of Barbie’s neighbors said he saw a Sheriff’s SUV pick Barbie up one night,” Jack said. He didn’t say that the neighbor couldn’t see who was driving. He’d let the sheriff assume who. “The Chief gave the soil samples to the State Agriculture people, and she said they narrowed the soil down to some places near Baton Rouge.”

  “Too far,” Guidry said.

  “But when we talked to Kurtis later he showed us the report and said there were map coordinates of the places where the soil could have come from. One of the top two places named was the Laveau Plantation. We asked who patrolled that area and Kurtis said the unofficial order had gone out to leave the Plantation area alone. Barbie was known to patrol near the plantation.”

  “So, Anna lied to you about where the dirt came from? And Barbie is with the plantation. And Kurtis told you that Anna didn’t want her people to patrol there.”

  Guidry stuck his hands in his pockets and rocked on the balls of his feet. Then he stopped rocking and said, “Sounds to me like Kurtis should get the warrant. He’s the one with firsthand knowledge of all of this. He’s the one that came up with the State Ag info. He’s the one that connected Barbie with the plantation, so we only have his word for it that Anna was holding back on you.”

  Jack said, “Kurtis gave us all of that, but we went to the plantation and were met with armed guards and a locked gate. I didn’t know sugarcane was that valuable.” He decided to use everything he had. “And a woman in town said she had attended some rituals at the plantation and crazy stuff was going on.”

  Guidry laughed out loud. “Tooty, right? A Slice of Heaven?”

  “She seemed credible to me,” Jack lied.

  Guidry smirked and said, “I hate to tell you this, but Tooty isn’t quite right in the head. Her parents named her right. She’s a tad bit Tooty if you ask me. You can’t use that woman as a basis to get a warrant. And the Laveau Plantation is in Plaquemine city. If we try to get a warrant, the judge will want to know why PPD isn’t involved. That’ll open a new bag of worms, and someone from PPD will be calling the Plantation to warn them we’re coming. I’m not saying we can’t get a warrant, but it would be better if we had something more solid.”

  Jack didn’t mention the strange behavior of the children at the church. Or that the kids he’d seen were about the same age as Evelyn Blanchard, Liddell’s missing niece. The missing person case wasn’t positively connected to the murders or to Dusty—yet. And he didn’t want to give the Sheriff any more ammunition to shoot his warrant request down. He and Liddell had no authority to request a warrant. They could be used as witnesses to the information used to get the warrant, but he wasn’t even sure if they would be allowed to be present when the warrant was served. The Chief, Anna Whiteside, had already determined the soil samples came from Baton Rouge and that they had a serial killer on the loose. She would be no help.

  “Do you have any real evidence that a crime has been committed or is being committed on the Laveau Plantation?” Guidry asked.

  Jack didn’t, but he told him about the two armed guards at the gate of the plantation and how the one was high. “Isn’t there some law about guards being armed?” Jack asked Guidry. “One of these guys wasn’t twenty-one, and he looked like he was high. Is it a requirement here to be on something to carry a gun? In Indiana even security guards have to go through a training program and be registered with EPD or the Sheriff to carry a weapon.” In Indiana, most private security guards carried handcuffs, a baton, and a radio or cell phone, not a shotgun.

  Guidry sighed. “I can send someone out there to see who these two yahoos are, but the most we could do is confiscate the shotguns for public safety until we look into the matter. But that still doesn’t get us into those buildings. I could get Baton Rouge to fly a chopper over the place, but that wouldn’t help unless they have a whole crop of marijuana growing. I think Baton Rouge has enough to do without spending time and money on a guess from two detectives from Indiana.”

  Jack was out of plausible arguments, and being out of options tended to piss him off. “Okay. What would you suggest?”

  “I’m not knocking what you boys are saying. I agree with you that something out there stinks to high heaven. There are a lot of coincidences and I’m not a big fan. If you had something more”—He searched for the word—“immediate. If you had something like that, we might get some wiggle room around notifying PPD. Know what I’m saying?”

  Jack understood. Plausible deniability. If Jack did a little trespassing and got caught, if anyone got thrown under the bus, it wouldn’t be the Sheriff.

  To make his point clearer, Guidry said, “Don’t get yourselves shot. And don’t kill anyone.”

  * * *

  The Sheriff had issued a “Be on the Lookout” for Dusty Parnell and her Harley motorcycle, but by that evening neither she nor the motorcycle had turned up. If it was up to Jack he would have put pictures of Dusty and the Harley on all the local channels by now, but he wasn’t in charge, and he didn’t want to damage an already tenuous relationship by telling Guidry what to do.

  He had called Kurtis’s cell phone twice already and had left voice mails. It was getting dark when he and Liddell headed back to the fishing cabin. Liddell called his brother to see if he wanted to meet them somewhere close to the house and get an update. Landry insisted they come to the house and eat. His words, “I’m not afraid of no asshole that can’t hit someone as big as you.”

/>   They pulled up in front of Landry’s, and he was waiting for them on the porch with two open beers and a tumbler of Scotch. Jack sat down with his Scotch. He was too tired to worry about being used for target practice again. If Troup had fired the shots at them last night, he was a very good shot and warning them off. If Dusty had shot at them, she was long gone by now, or had burned up in the fire. But for some reason he didn’t think she was dead. He hoped she wasn’t dead. She had a lot of explaining to do.

  Liddell wanted breakfast for dinner. Landry filled two plates with scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast. Jack took his food and went back to the porch, where he could have some privacy on the phone, and called Katie.

  “Jack, I’m glad you called. I miss you,” she said.

  He was glad to hear her voice, and hadn’t realized how much he missed her until now. Katie’s voice had a calming effect on him. Or three fingers of Scotch had done the trick. He could hear the brothers inside the house giving each other hell. And speaking of hell, Landry looked like he hadn’t slept for days.

  “I just called to say I love you,” Jack said. “I miss you too.”

  “How is Liddell holding up? Marcie has been staying with me, and she’s a wreck. But don’t tell Liddell.”

  “I won’t tell him,” Jack said. “I thought he called her today. I’ll have to kick some yeti butt.” Katie laughed, and he said, “What? You don’t think I can kick this Cajun’s ass?”

  “You two would make a good married couple, Jack.”

  “Nah,” Jack said. “He snores, and his feet are hairy.”

  Katie laughed at his tired humor and he felt tightness in his chest. This was the Katie he had fallen in love with. She hadn’t changed. He was the one who had fallen down a rabbit hole after the miscarriage. He didn’t think he’d blamed her for losing the baby, but he realized that maybe he had. After all, someone had to be to blame. If it wasn’t her, it had to be him. And so he’d punished himself by taking away the only love he had left—Katie.